Preparing for his swim down the east coast of the North Island, Jono Ridler had few expectations.
The two he did have were certainties: that it would be hard, and it would be taxing on the body.
Four weeks and more than 400km into his record-setting journey, Ridler is getting what he bargained for.
“We’ll start at the top of the body and work our way down,” Ridler told the Herald when asked how his body is holding up.
“Salt exposure, firstly, to the mouth can be quite corrosive. So, I’ve had periods where I’ve had quite a raw back of my mouth and tongue. I’ve been managing that through using mouthwash and swirling coconut oil. That seems to be helping.
“At the moment, I’ve got an ulcer in my cheek wall and one on my lip and that’s kind of a direct result of spending a lot of time in the seawater and potentially some of it being dirty. That’s been a little bit tricky to deal with because you just have to keep working through that.
“And then muscular, I’ve had some pain in like my shoulders, my back, biceps, forearms, wrists, kind of everywhere. It’s just all over upper-body pain.
“My lower body’s really good, though.”
Ridler has a small team with him for the journey, and is able to get treatment for his various ailments. For muscular niggles, he estimates self-treatment is effective about 80% of the time, while external support from physiotherapists and osteopaths can do a little bit more with massage and/or dry needling.
Earlier this week, Ridler swam with strapping on his left wrist and with a closed-fist technique due to an inflamed tendon.
“It’s a bit of a combination of different therapies, I guess – depending on how it feels and how it may inhibit the swim progress.”
Outside of the demands on him physically, the only other real expectation Ridler and his team had was that they would encounter some of the many creatures living in the ocean along the way.
So far, that has included jellyfish, turtles, whales, penguins, schools of fish, dolphins and, at one point, a shark swimming right alongside him.
“For me, I haven’t had a lot of experience around sharks. And if you talk to people that have spent a lot of time around sharks, they have a different relationship with somebody who hasn’t and might have only seen the movie Jaws or something like that, right?
“But I guess I’ve had enough encounters now that I’m a bit more comfortable with them. I’m not completely comfortable and that’s really just an exposure thing. It’s just time knowing how they behave. Like any animal, they have predictable behaviours, and it’s knowing what those look like.”
As Ridler has travelled further down the county, he has noticed his environment going from being “quite alive” as it was in the Far North, to seeing “a lot of evidence of life” but not having as many actual encounters.
“That’s kind of, I guess, indicative of fishing pressure as much as anything else as we’ve gone down the coast.”
It’s that issue at the heart of Ridler’s decision to take on this challenge in the first place.
Teaming up with Live Ocean, Ridler hoped to bring the commercial fishing practice of bottom trawling into the spotlight and encourage the conversation on what more environmentally friendly alternatives could be explored.
Bottom trawling is a practice where heavy nets are dragged along the sea floor to catch large quantities. It is a practice that has a destructive impact on the sea floor environment, while bycatch – non-target species caught in the nets – is also a concern. Bycatch is often dumped back into the ocean whether it’s dead or alive after being sorted.
Ridler had been well supported in his swim so far, noting he has had people in their boats to share their support and jump in for a swim alongside him, though there were safety protocols and other rules in place Ridler had to adhere to for his world record attempt.
He also targeted seven local stopping points for activations where he can meet people and share his message, with the next being scheduled at Mt Maunganui on Thursday afternoon. These activations generally come at the conclusion of one of Ridler’s swim legs.
“It’s very energising to be involved with those and it’s really one of the goals of this project, this mission, is to engage people and as the word kind of suggests, activate them so they can kind of be advocates, they can go out and spread the word in their communities,” Ridler said.
“It’s a super important part of it and most of the time I feel quite energised. After the Auckland one, if you saw me walking around, I was a bit of a zombie because it finally hit after the event, but during the event it was great.”
Setting out from North Cape on January 5, Ridler had anticipated the swim would take him roughly 90 days to complete. Initially expected to be a 1609km swim, he has adjusted his route to one that optimises his progress and prioritises the goal of getting to Wellington, instead of hugging the coastline where possible as originally planned. That has seen the estimated distance drop to around 1350km.
While poor weather had set that back early in the journey, he said the 90-day window was still looking good.
“In terms of the total distance covered to this point, we’re slightly behind, but ever so slightly and we’ve been catching up with every day basically because we’ve been covering additional mileage.
“The recent weekly mileage has definitely been hopping up and based on our current trajectory, we’re set to finish within that 90-day time period that we had put out there.”
Christopher Reive joined the Herald sports team in 2017, bringing the same versatility to his coverage as he does to his sports viewing habits.